by Charlene Spretnak 

Fr. Andrew Greeley spends half of each year in Tucson and wrote several years ago that when converts to Catholicism in his parish church there complete their studies and become Catholic, they immediately ask the parish priest when they will get their rosaries.

“Oh, that,” the priest would have to say. He, like nearly all parish priests today, would then have to explain that the rosary was largely phased out of modern Catholic lives after Vatican II (1962-65), as it was considered too medieval and too Marian to be important in the new, streamlined Catholicism. [Historical note: Lots of very good and hugely important changes came out of Vatican II, but those are a different matter from the decisions that were made about Mary, which constituted only a small portion of the great council’s reforms.]

It’s odd how little is known outside of Catholicism about the radical minimizing of the full spiritual presence of the Virgin Mary during the past forty years. In the modernized Catholicism, Mary’s historical dimension is still present, but pretty much everything else got lopped off.

The exception in the United States, of course, is in ethnic parishes, who have pretty much ignored the dethroning and demoting of Mary, as have large parts of the rest of the Catholic world. So now the American Catholic Church houses both the dominant position (strongly favoring solely the historical, more rational version of Mary the village woman) and the minority position (favoring also her cosmological, symbolic, and mystical dimensions). Seems to me that a both/and solution is the way home.

by Amina Wadud

Some people balk at any notion of prayer.  It goes against our sense of mastery as humans.  It is even more difficult for some in the new age to reconcile time-honored rituals that have both an impersonal and personal dimension.  For one thing, linking the personal with the impersonal and the divine with the profane confounds us.  Indeed for some, the question is, why link at all; or, aren’t we always linked? 

The traditional form of daily worship in Islam, the salat, likewise has been thought of within a wide spectrum of questions.  Why pray five times a day? Some ask.  Why all those movements? Asks others.  Why does it have to be in Arabic? Why have women not been leaders of salat in mixed congregations?  All are valid concerns in the pluralist contexts of today.

The answers I give expand from the silly to the sublime, the serious to the sadistic.  One of my favorite questions, especially from students, How can any one find the time?  My answers have evolved.  One of them is: it takes less time to prayer the obligatory prayer than it does to smoke a cigarette.  I guess it is a question of motivation…

The main motivation for the formal ritual is the embodied experience of the human/divine relationship.  Like other “sacred” times, places, persons, events, the salar is non-ordinary, as a mode of communication with, to and at some level for that which is Non-ordinary.  The postures reflect the very human aspect of its performance.

First, are the intentions: whether an elaborate formula or a simple stop in the endless rush to and fro of daily life, often motivated by something other than our most inward serenity and its intimate connection with all that is created and the Creator. 

Then the performer must stand, if able.  This is the ultimate representation of our moral agency (in Arabic khilafah).  According to the Qur’an the purpose of all human life is khilafah on the earth.  We are created as agents of the divine IN context: on the earth.  There is no notion of a fall from grace.

Then the performer bows from the waist. This is the position from which one unit of salat gets it name: the position is ruku’ and the unit is called a rakah.  Daily prayers go from two to four rakahs throughout the day and evening.

When the performer prostrates it symbolizes an utmost expression of surrender, only to be repeated twice per unit, before resuming the stand or full posture of agency.  The prostration is perhaps the most significant of all the postures because it is so contrary to the notion of free will and human empowerment.  Indeed it is the position most reflective of surrender. 

The definition of Islam is “engaged surrender”.  It fulfills the whole spectrum of agency which is the consciousness: engaged in a continual state of surrender .  There is something greater than ourselves, yet only in as much as it is also intimate to ourselves. 

The thing about the most important ritual in Islamic practice is it symbolic representation and embodied reflection of this, through out the day. 

Why pray five times a day?  The goal is to achieve prayer never ending. It acts as reminder, such that before, after and during we are mindful and remember that we are not alone.

by Carol P. Christ

At the end of next week I will be joining 17 other women on a Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete. For many of us the most significant part of the journey is our descent four levels down, five hundred feet down, into the dark center of the Skoteino cave. The cave has a wide mouth and a large naturally-lit first level with high ceilings. There are no lights or paths inside the cave and the way down is steep. We grasp for handholds, slide on our bottoms, squeeze through narrow openings, take care not to slip and fall. Our culture has taught us to fear the dark. Many of us have also not learned to trust our bodies to carry and guide us into places that demand both physical and mental strength. Yet as we make our way down to the final round dark room of the cave, we learn that our bodies can be trusted. We push ourselves farther, seeking the darkness we had feared.

When we reach the center, we extinguish our headlamps and candles, sit together silently in the dark. On my first journeys into this cave, I was eager to find the answers to all of my questions about the meaning of life, the meaning of my life. I asked eagerly and sometimes sensed answers. Now I prefer simply to sit with my eyes open, allowing the silence and the dark to penetrate my skin and bones. I have no more questions--or at least none that can be answered.

There is something primordially Female about a cave—the narrow passageways, the moisture, the water, the color red (from iron deposits), the warm and welcoming dark, the transformations of mind and body that come to those who are willing to let go of fear and expectation and to enter into secret places of Her body.

Having entered into this cave and others many times, I do not understand how archaeologists can doubt (though still they do) that caves were and are known to be the womb of our Mother, the Earth. Only through long training not to see, not to feel, can we deny this knowledge that comes to us through our bodies, our bodies which are made from this earth.

For me the mystery is simply this:

From this it follows that all that inhabit the earth are our relatives and that we should tread lightly so as to do as little harm as possible to other living things.

by Susan Reimer-Torn 

Once we were one, my body swelled to offer him the inner space he would claim. Fetal cells live on for decades in a mother’s body. Gestation of the boy baby is for some women the most perfect male-female union they will ever experience. From that perspective, every birth is a fall from grace. I became a mother for the first time 28 years ago on Mother’s Day. Since that day I have come to understand that beings who have known each other intimately must be especially respectful of boundaries.

 For all of us there is an immense relief at being fully seen for who we are. But the mother-son relationship is daunting terrain for self-revelation. Mother and son limit their explorations into one another’s deepest selves. For the least courageous, mutual recognition is relegated to a single, sanitized day. Thwarted longing for complicity turns to bathos on a Hallmark card.

A son’s incapacity to integrate Mom in all of her aspects has contributed to centuries of woman repression. The mere glimpse of the fullness of Mom is in Jung’s words “terrifying and inescapable like fate.”

A more frivolous by-product of this overwhelm is a fascination with the imagined person of the Mother who is (so sonny can feel safe) not (really) Mother. A glimpse of the film Back to the Future reminds me of the popular take on the mother/ not mother genre. Marty is a teenager in a small American town. His father is an effectual loser, his mother is a perfect prude whom he suspects of “having grown up in a convent.” But when Marty travels back 30 years in time, he finds himself face to face with his mother as a flirtatious, lively young girl. To her, he is a new boy in town to whom she is irresistibly attracted and, to him, she is shockingly free in her advances. I catch the scene where they are sitting alone in a parked car and despite his protestations, she plants a hungry kiss on his electrified lips.

The impossible desire for closeness between mother and son finds an outlet in what I call the mother/not mother genre. This vivacious 17-year-old girl is Marty’s mother, yet she is not (yet). The scene teases and tempts when the requisite mother mask is stripped away by Marty’s fanciful encounter with her pre-mother self. Would that all of us could in some measure experience the same.

Who among us can forget Demian, Hermann Hesse’s lavishly Jungian coming of age novel in which the young Sinclair searches for “the mighty love apparition of his dreams.” Finally he finds his haunting dream image embodied in a real woman. The woman is Frau Eva, not his, but his friend Demian’s - and if there be anything in a name, all of humanity’s – mother. His love for the mother/not-my-mother comes to fill his whole life. And yet, somehow, he explains... His mother did not at all appear to be a woman who had a full grown son, so young and sweet were her face and hair, so taut and smooth her golden skin, so fresh her mouth … Love for mother flourishes in the paradoxical denial of her fleshly maternal aspects.

Mother/not mother does not always wax benign in the imaginations of man-child. I do not pretend to understand George Bataille’s ghoulish novella My Mother. This depraved, alcoholic libertine seductress comme maman will not stand for distancing or non-recognition. “I do not want your love unless you know I am repulsive and love me even as you know it,” says she as she pushes her boy over the edge. Full disclosure in the realm of mothers and sons is a risky business indeed.

On a sweeter note, there is the story Meeting Mother by the Hungarian Geza Csath. A young man yearns for the nearly forgotten mother who died giving birth to him when she was all of 20 years old, his own age in the present. His long departed mother appears to him in a dream of idyllic, if hopeless, reunion of two innocents in a sweet-scented field. But even in the dream of union with so girlish and distant a mother/ not mother, there are restraints. She refuses him a last embrace, as with graceful steps she disappears into the wood leaving him at its edge, knowing he cannot pursue her. I stood there, with my sight, following after her sorrowing, adoring – long long.

Make of it what you will. I’ll take it over a Hallmark card this birthday, Mother’s day, not Mother’s day, any day...On this happy occasion I find myself whistling the Lost Boys’ tune, the one when they decide to build a lovely little house for Wendy(not mother) and make her mom. She’ll be waiting at the door, we won’t be lonely any more… we have a mother, it’s nice to have a mother. And sometimes, it’s simply very nice to be one as well.

by Starhawk 

Perhaps because I am again in the midst of teaching a permaculture course, I find myself thinking about dirt.  What is more sacred than the living soil?  That matrix of life, the complex underground ecosystem that grows our food.  Soil rich in organic matter is a whole world of microorganisms, fungi, bacteria, insects, worms, roots minerals all interacting in a web of relationships that sustains life.  

And yet how we denigrate the earth that feeds us!  Anything that pertains to earth and ground--‘soiled’, ‘low’, ‘dirty’—is an insult.  “High”, “Light”, “celestial”—the unearthly and disembodied are all positive terms.

Earth is dark, and darkness is also associated with the dirty and the low.  “Enlightenment” is what we strive for in a state of “higher” consciousness.

When the body is denigrated, so are women, as our bodies are so intimately linked to those low and dirty processes that bring life into the world.   When ‘dark’ is a negative term, darker people are seen as having less value.  So these metaphors are deeply entrwined with sexism and racism.

I’ve worked in many ways to change their usage in my own writing and teaching.  I like to talk about ‘Deep Self’ instead of ‘High Self’’ “negative magic’ or ‘destructive power” instead of ‘Dark Powers.”   Many of the Goddess myths that speak of spiritual growth and transformation are journies of descent: Inanna’s journey into the World Below: Persphone’s sojourn in the Underworld.,  poets and musicians carried down into faery mounds.

I invite you all to join me in descending to the depths, getting low down and dirty, and nurturing our darker powers of growth and fertility.  Maybe then we could learn to appreciate the soil, and those who get their hands dirty by working with it.  If we love the earth, we can learn to love and grow and heal her soil, and when we do, we may also heal our culture and ourselves.